


Count the Inflammable Minutes

by Tawabids



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Bomb threat, Hostage Situation, John Whump, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-01
Updated: 2012-10-01
Packaged: 2017-11-15 10:53:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/526505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tawabids/pseuds/Tawabids
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It's a bomb, Sherlock, and its timer is your pet's heartbeat. If you attempt to remove it, it will explode. When the timer counts enough beats, John will take everything within a mile radius with him. You could slow his heart rate to give yourself more time, but really in the end, you have one choice. Kill John Watson to stop the bomb going off, or let it go off and he dies anyway, along with anyone nearby. Either way, I win."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Count the Inflammable Minutes

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for [this prompt here at the Sherlock BBC Kink Meme](http://sherlockbbc-fic.livejournal.com/9100.html?thread=44606604#t44606604).

Run, run, run, you are Sherlock Holmes, you are clever, you are very, very clever and you will solve this, you WILL SOLVE THIS or so be it that will be the END. Your footsteps echo on concrete, you calculate the height of the roof by how long it takes the footsteps to return to your ears, and then you hit the loading doors, clang! But they won't open, no matter how you haul at them. By the reverberated clatter, they are chained from the outside. No lock pick, no battering ram, no axe on earth can put you on the far side of the sheet metal door to access that chain.

Think, observe, think. Moriarty would not leave you in the huge metal trap to ponder the hardest decision on earth. There is a game here, he wants you to have hope so he can take it away. There is a mechanic's office in the corner, a box within a box. Run, fast as your long legs will go, perfectly efficient strides like the machine of evolution that you are. John said that once, you've deleted most of what it means, but you remember. 

Kick down the door. The lock bursts off and shatters the glass front of a framed photo. You glimpse rolling hills and a girl on a horse and figure out by the angle of the setting sun and the distant ocean that it is probably Wales. Irrelevant. Pull open drawers, scatter receipts and invoices. A jar of paper clips skims away from your elbow, falls and shatters. Glass shards useful? No. Keep searching. 

Toolbox. Magnifying glass. Large bottle of industrial-grade isopropanol. Useful? Yes.

Run back to John as fast as you can. A crack in the concrete floor almost trips you, but you recover. Don't think of Moriarty laughing. Don't think of the cameras. Focus. Kneel by John where he sits against the pillar, one hand cuffed high above his head. The other hand is around his abdomen. His shirt is open, the bomb protrudes from oozing flesh and clipped bone. You think of a video of a guinea worm being slowly drawn out through the skin. Irrelevant. The bomb is not a guinea worm.

"Drink this," you twist off the child protection cap of the isopropanol and press it close to John's lips.

"What?" he blinks, sniffing like you are offering a perfume sample. Dammit, sometimes you want to shake him, why doesn't he just DO AS HE'S TOLD?

"It'll repress your body's functions. Slow your heart rate, don't you understand?"

"We're not having this conversation," John says, even though you blatantly are. "You have to do it. I need you to," his free hand reaches up to touch your neck, a strange gesture, you brush off its implications, they are moot right now. You can't ignore how cold his skin is. He has been chained here a long time and he had lost blood.

"I can beat Moriarty. He wouldn't let me play if I couldn't win," you insist.

"Sherlock, I won't spend my last few minutes with you drunk off my face," he whispers. "I want to be lucid. You need to kill me."

No time to argue. You grab him in a headlock, pinch his nose and force the bottle into his mouth. He splutters and struggles and then drinks, ugh, it smells awful. You work out his limit by the rate of alcohol absorbance and his body mass and how much of an effect a couple of beers with Lestrade on Fridays has on him. You let him breath when you think it's just enough to be safe, but pushing it. 

Back to the toolkit. Tip it up on the floor, shuffle through, must find small screwdrivers, must find a way to diffuse the bomb without killing John. Behind you, he is coughing and retching onto the floor. He won't stick his fingers down his throat, if you know him, and you do. He always argues but never acts against you. 

Damn! Damn! DAMN! You shout the words, slam your gloved fists into the concrete. Nothing! Nothing delicate enough for the interior workings of that cutting-edge military device. You get up and run, run, run back to the office. Pull the drawers onto the floor. Upend the jar of sweets. Tear the calendar off the wall. Look for the tools to work with spectacles, clocks, anything, there must be SOMETHING. 

Paper clips? Would the paper clips do? You kneel and sweep them into your hands like the first snowball of winter, stuff them into your pockets and run, run, run. Back to John. Run. Back to John. Run.

John to slumped down over his own knees, hanging tense off the handcuff. Something is wrong. There is more blood than when you left. The pile of tools are in slightly different positions. Two of them are missing. You flash your memory from only a few minutes before: a slot screwdriver, and a craft knife.

Oh, John. 

You fall down in front of him, shedding paper clips, grasp his shoulders and push him back into a sitting position. His eyelids flicker in a dead faint. The craft knife is on the floor beside him, the blade bloody to four inches. Something soaked in crimson rolls off his lap. It is the bomb. He has cut it out of his own chest, in the sparse minutes since you left him. Idiot, no YOU, you are the idiot for leaving him, you are the idiot. You. You. You.

His hand is wrapped with a half torn-off sleeve and wadded into the gaping hole. You fling aside your coat, ball your scarf and press it tight, over his hand, over the wound that is draining him. 

"We won!" you scream into the empty, metal cavern. "No heartbeat for the bomb! We won!"

And Moriarty, laughing, releases the magnetic lock on the security door. 

 

Later, in the hospital, after you have frantically explained why John's stomach needs to be pumped for alcohol at the same time that the nurses are trying to apply a blood transfusion, after Lestrade has returned to tell you there is no sign of Moriarty (of course not), after the porters have thrown you physically out of the corridor where John was wheeled away, you sit with your head in your hands. Think, think, think, but there is nothing you can do.

Somewhere in surgery bay 6, John’s heartbeat is a ticking clock. Those dear muscular fibres, red as volcanic soil, they have been contracting and releasing every moment of every minute for his entire life. You wonder how you managed to miss almost every heartbeat. Why you never saw the pre-eminence of that endlessly reliable pound of perfectly synchronised muscle, filigreed with blood vessels, worn by the sandpaper of adrenalin and the slow drip of time. You can hear your own selfish heart pumping, like a blinking blue light in the back of your eyes. You would give one in each two pulses to John, if you could. You would wire the two of you together, chest to chest, and your ventricles would close once for you, once for John. Once for you, once for John. You would both have to take things carefully, perhaps you would even live half as long, but you would do it. If for no other reason than to pay back John’s heart. Darling heart, it worked so hard to get him this far and if it can’t go on you would pick up the slack on its behalf. If you could. 

And then someone comes, and you will delete their face and the sound of their voice, but you will never forget the words. 

"He's going to be okay."


End file.
